Sam Stourdzé (born 3 February 1973 in Paris) is a French exhibition curator and photography specialist. He studied economics and art history in Paris before beginning an independent curatorial career in his early twenties. With a particular focus on contemporary images and the relationships among art, photography, and cinema, he has developed a curatorial practice that moves fluidly between museum institutions and festival programming. Since September 2020 he has served as director of the Académie de France in Rome, based at the Villa Medici.

Stourdzé does not produce photographs himself; his visual contribution lies in framing, exhibiting, and recontextualizing images created by others. His approach is characterized by an interest in how photography and cinema interlock culturally, and in the popular, mass-mediated afterlife of photographs—what he calls their presence in broader visual economies. Unlike many curators who work strictly within art-historical canons, he often draws on vernacular imagery, film stills, archival press pictures, and the iconography of star culture. This transdisciplinary lens sets him apart from peers who tend to treat photography as an autonomous, purely museum-based medium.

Early in his career he took part as a boarder at the Villa Medici in 2007–2008, which gave him a formative sense of institutional life. He subsequently led the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, where he reinforced the foundation’s role as a hub for photography scholarship and exhibitions. From 2015 to 2020 he directed Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, the major summer photography festival, transforming it into a lively forum for both established and experimental image practices. During his tenure he helped expand the festival’s audience while preserving its tradition of thematic group shows and ambitious monographic surveys.

His career illustrates a European model of the curator as institutional entrepreneur. In 2020 he returned to the Villa Medici as its director, taking on a historic palace and residency program that spans all artistic disciplines. There he has blended his photography background with a broader commitment to supporting artists across media. His frequent lectures and interviews, such as his appearance on TEDxSaclay, reveal his belief that cultural institutions act as economic and social actors, not merely as repositories of objects. This pragmatic, outward-looking attitude distinguishes him from more inward-facing museum curators.

For photobook collectors, Stourdzé’s importance lies in the catalogs and exhibition publications that accompany his curated projects. He has collaborated with Paris-based publishers such as Delpire & Co and Atelier EXB, which publish serious, well-designed photography books. His exhibition catalogs often function as edited anthologies, bringing together image sequences and focused essays. A collector interested in the intersection of photography and moving images, or in the institutional history of contemporary French photography, will find in these publications a reliable entry point, especially as they preserve curatorial insights that might otherwise be lost after exhibitions close.

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Sam Stourdzé (born 1973) is a French curator and photography historian. He directed the Musée de l’Élysée, Switzerland’s museum of photography, from 2011 to 2019, and was appointed director of the Rencontres d’Arles, the major annual photography festival in southern France, in 2020. Stourdzé is known for thematic exhibitions that critically examine photographic practices and social themes, and he has contributed to numerous publications on photography. He has also carried out curatorial projects for international institutions and served on juries and advisory boards.